Photos by Andre Gagne.
The lights go off, a microsecond of darkness, and then the rumble roar rises. This is your audience. They will make your show or they will break your show and without their energy you’re just a couple of people on a stage pumping your songs into a smattering of scattered appreciative applause or, worse, deadening silence. For the length of a set you’re working for them and, if you’re lucky, they’ll cheer, they’ll clap and a few of ‘em will leave with a t-shirt. If you’re awesome they’ll adore you, hang on every word you say, sing your songs back to you with enthusiasm and leave with two t-shirts.
If you’re Marianas Trench you’re all of the above with the added bonus of having a crowd made up of, judging from the octave range, crazed young women or exceptionally talented male countertenors. The former would gladly sire enough of your offspring to populate a small country ensuring your lineage continued well into the next millennia. They not only know every word to your songs but every syllable in perfect sync with the performance. Conjoined, their voices will be louder than yours and they don’t have amps the size of the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith. Calling them rabid would do a disservice to an angry, diseased Rottweiler. These fans are like an over-caffeinated pack of wildebeests with a sugar high about two seconds after being spooked by a pack of famished hyenas. They were ready for this show three months before you got into town, they already have a t-shirt and they’re leaving with three more!
10 years ago Marianas Trench walked onto the stage of a place lead singer Josh Ramsay can’t pronounce anymore. You can’t really blight the man. I mean, Zaphod Beeblebrox is a bit of a tongue twister even for a dude with his vocal abilities. Back then they played for about six people and, if anything, made them believers with the power of their musicianship. They gave those six a glimpse down the rabbit hole of what was to come.
Cut to a decade later. Tonight, when the lights went off in TD Place, what happened next wasn’t so much a sound of elation as it was a force to be reckoned with. 5,000 forces to be reckoned with if you want to get numerical. It was going to be one of those nights when the stadium could have saved a few bucks and just nixed the seats. They wouldn’t need them. These butts attached to these people attached to these cacophonous vocal chords did not come to sit. Oh hell no. The sold-out crowd didn’t just go electric. They went nuclear!
Ramsay probably could have come on stage and started reading passages from The Anatomy of Melancholy and they’d still be going nuts in the aisles. Thankfully, though, the boys came to pop punk rock the house on what they are calling their Last Crusade tour. Now, before you young girls start crying buckets into your bedspreads, the band isn’t going anywhere. They probably just needed a good tagline to write their name in the Indiana Jones font and the Temple of Doom tour doesn’t have as good a ring to it.
Now, ludicrously loyal and insane fan base notwithstanding, could the ante maybe have been up’ed by, say, having a gigantic papier-mâché boulder bust through the stage while Ramsay swung in on a whip from the top of the arena rafters? Naw, probably not. I guess the fedora would have clashed with the black and white rock star hoodie, tight pants and glow in the dark guitar.
The band knew they had a charged crowd and they weren’t holding back anything. Ramsay may have had to up his usual nitro-fuelled pace to compete. He didn’t remain on stage long, taking to the audience to be met by a shrill scream heard by at least one stray mutt over in Hull. The fans were not deterred by his security entourage. Wherever Ramsay went they followed and a few of them got close enough for a good, long feel below the singers black and silver belt. Bet ya’ that whip would have come in handy then, Josh!
The band tore through a set that included hits like “Cross My Heart” and “Fallout” along with tracks from their new album Astoria. If you just happened to walk in, however, you’d think every tune was a #1 smash. The audience was just that into it and you couldn’t help but get wrapped up in their uber-fandom.
It was the kind of show that made you a fan even if you were just there initially to photograph having been granted credentials at the last minute forcing you to rush across town to snag your camera and just make it into the arena before the lights dimmed not really familiar with the band and hoping for at least something tolerable. (Err…you know, not naming any names or anything.)
What you got was 90 minutes of current channeled into your now adrenaline pumped body. What you got was infectious fun punctuated by power chords and falsetto wails. What you got was a dedicated band working in maximum overdrive for an equally amped up, dedicated audience. You got their sweat. You got the full on, full speed, take no prisoners, all out Marianas Trench petrol pop punk paroxysm.
Oh yeah, and you got the t-shirt!
SETLIST:
Encore
